Growing up, I was always enthralled by Ronnie Barker. He made my dad howl with laughter, which always intrigued me, and he had the rare gift of being as good a performer as he was a writer.

It's because finance is so baffling that makes being an economist such a safe option. It nestles down comfortably with psychiatry and astrology as a profession where getting it patently wrong is just not a problem - and also, rather wonderfully, seems to have no adverse affect on their professional standing whatsoever.

In my career, all my most important breaks have come from Edinburgh. Winning awards, being reviewed, bagging my BBCR4 series and the chance to tour has all come from Edinburgh, which begs the question, why the hell have I left it so long to come back?

My job is to make people laugh. If I've upset them instead, then I haven't done my job properly.

I think I was well brought up, for my father and mother were of one mind regarding the care of the family.

My father was an opera singer who constantly tried to persuade me not to enter into an artistic career.

My father, Cecil Banks Mullis, and mother, formerly Bernice Alberta Barker, grew up in rural North Carolina in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. My dad's family had a general store, which I never saw. My grandparents on his side had already died before I started noticing things.

We build schools and give government loans and grants to college kids; for those of us who are parents, tuition will often be the last big subsidy we give the children we've raised.